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Jeff Lemire’s epic sci-fi love story continues, and whilst this issue wasn’t quite as experimental as the first one, as there’s no flip-book format, this was still a gripping read and Lemire does still find interesting ways to play with story telling structure.

This issue shows what happened when William and Nika came face to face. They can’t really have a conversation, because they speak different languages, and Lemire does this nifty thing where 1 page is from William’s perspective, and you can’t tell what Nika is saying, and then the next is Nika’s perspective, and William’s words are absent, and so on and so on. The two characters ever-so-slowly parse out what’s going on, that Nika has travelled to Earth from the far-future, which is kind of a mindfuck for both of them. I suppose some readers may find this issue a bit slow, as Lemire takes 22 pages for our characters to find out what they already know, but the dialogue was charming and I liked the techniques used, so it worked for me. I think this issue went a long way in showing that even though this is a story that spans millennia, it is actually deeply personal and close in on Nika and William.

In the end though, there is one word that both of these two characters can understand, and that’s, you guessed it... Trillium. Nika eats one of the Trillium flowers, then when William touches her, they both trip balls and see each other’s past histories. So it looks like the problem of our two leads not being able to understand each other is gone for the rest of the series, unfortunately, after this, the door to the Temple opens up again, and Nika heads back to the future (hey, that’s catchy, someone should do something with that).

I’m very excited by what’s next in this title, I thought that Nika and William would stick together for this series, but now it looks like it’s going to be a story of them trying to get back together. Lemire’s artwork was fantastic also, it’s always special when he pulls double-duty, and combined with Jose Villarubia’s colours, this is a great-looking comic, I especially liked how the William-focussed pages hand standard, rectangular panels, whereas the Nika pages were more experimental, with circular panels, Lemire is always changing little things in his art, and it always works.

I am really curious to discover why both William and Nika feel like they know each other from somewhere. These characters were separated by hundreds of years, how could they possibly recognize each other?

Great second issue. Loved the way Lemurs dealt with the characters converging and attempting to communicate. Really interested in why he knows what Trillium is, the deja by, and what link there is to the death of earth and the convenient arrival of the caul.